What do we teach children about climate change?

The omission of climate change as a topic in the New Zealand Social Science curriculum (Years 1-10) led to a predictable response from academics and teachers. But the most important question is not whether climate change appears in the curriculum, but what on earth we think we are going to tell the children about it?

Including or excluding two words in a curriculum document is easy. Deciding what young people need to understand, feel and do in response to a future that scientists say will be hotter, less predictable and more constrained than the one their parents knew is harder.

The omission was surprising. The curriculum, after all, is a message about the future. It is what one generation believes the next will need to engage in the important conversations about the world in which they will live. Among the scientific community and educated public, human-induced climate change is established. The challenge we face is learning to live in a warming world. We are fast becoming aware of ideas such as the ‘Anthropocene’, ‘planetary boundaries’ and ‘tipping points’.

In curriculum terms, New Zealand is not unusual. Many countries are grappling with how climate change should be taught. For example, the UK government only published its guidance to schools and teachers about climate change in December 2023. But there has been much work within environmental education to get us to this point.

As long ago as 2008 the UK government issued all schools with a copy of Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth and in 2004 the NZ Parliamentary Commissioner published a report called ‘Learning to Change’. But getting climate change ‘on’ the curriculum is only the start. The more difficult question is what we believe they need to know to live in a climate-altered future.

Some readers will see the omission of climate change from the curriculum as a serious setback. I am less convinced. But just because it’s absent from the curriculum doesn’t mean teachers won’t teach it. In my own discipline – geography – climate change has moved from being an environmental backdrop to the defining ‘global issue’ of our time. Now, climate change is central to the discipline, even prompting one geographer to remind us that ‘climate is not everything’. With or without a curriculum statement, climate change can still be taught. What I am interested in is what we are going to say about it. 

Even if climate change were written back into the curriculum, as Education Minister Erica Stanford has promised, we would still require a ‘heated debate’ about what we are trying to teach. According to the Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Science framework developed by the United States Global Change Research Program (2009) a climate literate person:

• understands the essential principles of the earth’s climate system,
• knows how to assess scientifically credible information about climate
• communicates about climate and climate change in a meaningful way, and, 
• can make informed and responsible decisions about actions that may affect climate.

At first glance that sounds reasonable. Yet two questions stand out to me. First, if it were a matter of just knowing the facts, the problem would have been sorted, and we would not be where we are today. We can all think of areas where more knowledge does not necessarily lead to a change in behaviour.

Second, how far can any one individual ‘take actions’ that may affect climate outcomes? Lots of my colleagues at the university accept the idea that academics should reduce their carbon footprints by making fewer flights. But that overestimates their impact compared with the billionaire class with their private jets leaving warming contrails across the sky.

Another set of choices is about whether climate change education should be concerned with mitigation (slowing down the rate of change), adaptation (learning to live with the effects of climate change) or reversal (inventing ways to stop climate change – for example, cloud-seeding or geoengineering).

In simple terms, are we looking to educate people to make better choices about what to consume? Preparing planners to think about how to redesign our towns and homes to deal with rising sea levels and extreme heat? Or finding inventors who can think up ‘green’ ways to capture carbon and store it elsewhere? (Governments are full of talk of the ‘green skills’ needed for a transition economy.)

When I discuss these issues with student teachers, we quickly encounter the tension between hope and realism. Climate change education is as much about our emotions as about reasons. Psychologists (coming late to the scene) report high levels of ‘climate anxiety’ among children and young people. Some public educators tell us that ‘doom stories’ are counterproductive, and we need to ‘bright side’ some of the success stories.

Then there are those such as the British environmentalist Jonathan Porritt who, over his long career, has tried to work with governments and industry to build a frame of capitalism as if the world matters. In Hope in Hell (2020) he argued there was still time to avoid the worst outcomes.

Five years later, in Love, Anger & Betrayal (written with young Just Stop Oil activists), he writes in a darker mood, of how young people have been betrayed by oil companies and governments who knew exactly what was coming but did everything to carry on as normal.

So, deciding what we will tell the children about climate change is fraught with confusion and challenges. This is why Greta Thunberg, the climate activist who at 16 was named the 2019 Time magazine person of the year, elicits divided reactions.

By insisting that young people would prepare better to spend time campaigning or action to tackle climate change than in class studying the curriculum, she raised the question of what education is for in a time of climate extremes. Meanwhile, most educational debates focus on raising standards while the planet burns.

The challenge is not simply to teach climate change. It is about how to best educate young people for a future that will be shaped by it.